Our Kitchen Reveal + Before and After

I’m so excited to finally share with you the details of our kitchen remodel! If you’ve been following me on Instagram, you would have seen some behind-the-scenes action during this quarantine period of our gradual efforts of remodeling while we were living in this home (with two kids two and under)!

In this post, I’m going to mainly focus on photos and link to where I shopped for everything. I may dive a little deeper into other choices in other posts, but this one is mainly for the reveal! Below, I’m sharing one of the listing photos from our house and a shot of the kitchen today. We honestly don’t have any photos of the kitchen because we did two stages of renovation to the space.

The first stage was painting the cabinets, replacing the faucet, removing the upper cabinets, changing the light fixture and upgrading the fridge and stove. That was our Phase 1 and we lived with (and loved) that kitchen for 11 months of living here before starting our big remodel.

Phase 1

Phase 2

For Phase 2, we had really big plans and ending up changing almost every one of them haha! We tried to do everything as safely (and as inexpensively) as possible because of um — that pandemic!

FLOORS

We started with the flooring, which we knew we wanted in the whole house, including the kitchen. Since we had already decided to replace the flooring, we knew that the cabinets would have to come up and we may as well start our kitchen renovation. We chose these floors from Lumber Liquidators for our living room, dining room, hallway, hall closets, kitchen, and laundry room. Our living room is a converted garage and does not have subfloor. We went with nontoxic luxury vinyl-plank floors because they are water resistant, durable, affordable and can be installed over concrete, subfloor, or tile. The total for approximately 1000 square feet of floors was about $1400 (about $400-$500 of that was for the kitchen). So far, we’re loving them, but I will definitely do a blog post in the future!

CABINETS

We ordered the cabinets from Lowe’s online and just showed up to pick them up. We doubled the amount of storage from our previous tiny kitchen. The reason there was such a small kitchen to begin with was because originally, the house was JUST the upstairs before the garage was converted into a living area. That space in the kitchen was left open for a dine-in table and chairs. We use the upstairs space as a dining room, so we decided to fill up the blank space with more cabinets! Amazing. The total for them was about $1300.

COUNTERTOPS

Next, we went back and forth about the countertops. I really wanted to do a terrazzo countertop but we could not make it work on the budget we were on. We decided to go with butcher block and white wash and seal it ourselves. The total for all of our countertops was about $500.

TERRAZZO TILE

This was such a huge thing for me, and what I designed the whole kitchen around. Since we decided against doing the terrazzo countertops, we decided to DIY terrazzo for our backsplash. After sitting on that idea for a few weeks, we realized our project list was never-ending and we needed to outsource for this idea by buying terrazzo tiles. I’m SO GLAD WE DID. I searched far and wide on the internet until my eyes literally burned for the perfect tile. I ended up choosing this Portfolio Confetti tile from Build.com. Tile, mortar, grout, and spacers was around $450.

RUG

I searched so many vintage rugs, and I ordered two for this space. I’m currently loving this one that’s in the photos. I bought it for about $200 from this Etsy shop.

HARDWARE

I ordered these handle pulls from Etsy, but the seller has since disabled her store. They are 4” and seem pretty big but look perfect. Similar ones are here. Not gonna lie, I was sooo impatient and was pretty sure my package got lost in the mail. BUT! After 8 weeks, they arrived in amazing condition and they are just so gorgeous. No regrets! I bought 16 and spent about $160 on these.

SINK & FAUCET

WE bought this faucet from Homary and have loved it so far! I had someone message me saying they had the same one and the braiding came unraveled. Yikes! Luckily, that hasn’t happened to us. We’ve both worked in restaurants and absolutely love a pull-down faucet. This one is pretty heavy duty! We spent about $130 on the faucet.

We purchased this gorgeous black double-bowl undermount sink from Lowe’s. It was $250.

FLOATING SHELVES

Collin actually built us a pantry in our Phase 1 renovation and we repurposed all of that wood for our shelves! I honestly did not think I would love the chunky look, but it looks perfect since we’re only doing one shelf.

Love this little planter we’re using as a sponge holder from Target. These little towel hooks are also amazing.

GRAND TOTAL = $3,490

We are so thrilled to share the finished kitchen with you! Like I said, we were on a tight budget and wanted to make a big impact. Collin did everything himself, so if you feel like that’s something you’re up for, you could have the same luck!

There’s some things that aren’t finished, but not anything that would warrant delaying the reveal any longer. Now, to slowly accumulate cool ceramics and keep my plants alive. Ha!

As always, leave any questions in the comments! :)